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What is Quality Assurance?

Quality assurance, or QA for short, refers to planned and systematic production processes that provide confidence in a product's suitability for its intended purpose. It is a set of activities intended to ensure that products (goods and/or services) satisfy customer requirements in a systematic, reliable fashion. QA cannot absolutely guarantee the production of quality products, unfortunately, but makes this more likely.

Two key principles characterise QA: "fit for purpose" (the product should be suitable for the intended purpose) and "right first time" (mistakes should be eliminated). QA includes regulation of the quality of raw materials, assemblies, products and components; services related to production; and management, production and inspection processes.

It is important to realize also that quality is determined by the intended users, clients or customers, not by society in general: it is not the same as 'expensive' or 'high quality'. Even lowly bottom-of-the-range goods can be considered quality items if they meet a market need.

What is software Testing?

Software testing is an empirical investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the product or service under test , with respect to the context in which it is intended to operate. This includes, but is not limited to, the process of executing a program or application with the intent of finding software bugs.

Scope

A primary purpose for testing is to detect software failures so that defects may be uncovered and corrected. This is a non-trivial pursuit. Testing cannot establish that a product functions properly under all conditions but can only establish that it does not function properly under specific conditions. The scope of software testing often includes examination of code as well as execution of that code in various environments and conditions as well as examining the quality aspects of code: does it do what it is supposed to do and do what it needs to do. In the current culture of software development, a testing organization may be separate from the development team. There are various roles for testing team members. Information derived from software testing may be used to correct the process by which software is developed. There are testing methods:

• Black box testing
• White box testing
• Grey Box Testing
• Non Functional Software Testing

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